Contact

eNews

Amherst College English Professor Judith Frank is Finalist for Lambda Literary Award

January 28, 2005Director of Media Relations 413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.--- Judith Frank, author and professor of English at Amherst College, has been named a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for her new novel, Crybaby Butch (2004). The awards will be presented in New York City on Thursday, June 2, at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York.

Nominated in the Lesbian Debut Fiction category, Frank's first novel examines the surprising turns that issues of education, gender, class and racial identity can cause in people's lives, and explores the connection between two butches of different generations. One is a middle-class, 30-something adult literacy teacher-as Frank has been. The other is her older, working-class student.

The Lambda Literary Foundation is devoted to the promotion, preservation and publication of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender literature. The Lambda Literary Awards honor the best among thousands of nominations received from across the country. Five nominees are selected in each of 20 categories. A panel of 74 judges, chosen to represent the diversity of the LGBT literary community, selects the winners. Frank has published stories in other voices and The Massachusetts Review, which published a chapter of Crybaby Butch for which Frank was awarded the fiction prize of the Astraea Foundation's Emerging Lesbian Writer's Fund in 2000.

Frank received a Ph.D. in English literature and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Cornell University. Her published work includes the book Common Ground: Eighteenth Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor. She is currently working on a second novel, titled Noah's Ark, about an American couple's death in a Jerusalem suicide bombing that compels the husband's gay brother, Daniel, to adopt the orphaned children and take them back to the U.S.